by Amelia Wilde
Twenty minutes later, there’s nothing left in the rooms except furniture. I have a broom and a vacuum and I run them both over the brand new flooring, starting with the wood and ending with a trip over the still-plush carpeting.
Then, once I’ve put those back into the broom closet tucked next to the pantry, I go through the silent house to the second bedroom.
It’s been painted and trimmed and carpeted to within an inch of its fucking life, but it’s completely empty.
I know exactly what I’m going to do with it.
But—shit, it’s well after seven o’clock. No store with what I need is going to be open at this hour.
Not in Lockton, anyway.
The furniture store I’m thinking of—the one Addison always used to love—won’t open until tomorrow at nine.
So I do the only thing I can think of to do in my spotless, empty house. I order a pizza. I choose a shitty movie. And I settle in to wait.
I pull into Anderson’s parking lot at ten to nine and leave the rental car running. There are a couple cars in the side parking lot—people must be inside already—but I’m not going to do anything so ridiculous as knock on the door early like some kind of sleep-deprived psycho who can’t wait another ten minutes to browse through some eclectic furniture.
Nine minutes later, I turn off the car. I hitched a small trailer to the back, courtesy of my surprisingly non-asshole father, and I’m ready to get this shit done.
As soon as they flip the sign to open, I hurry inside.
The salesman—or owner, I don’t think they actually employ that many people here—turns around, his eyebrows raised.
“I’m sure you don’t normally have people breaking the door down.”
“No,” he says with a laugh. “You do know this is a furniture store, right?”
“Yes.” And without another second wasted, I tell him exactly what I’m looking for.
He nods, then the corners of his mouth turn down a little. “We don’t have the exact items you’re describing,” he says, and he looks past me like he’s flipping through a mental inventory of everything they have here. “But we’re going to come really, really close.”
Forty minutes later, he’s helping me strap everything down into the trailer, which looks like it will collapse if I’m not extremely careful.
“You sure you can make it back?”
“I’ll make it back.”
No, I’m not fucking sure. I’m not sure at all. But at this point, there’s no more time to lose. I’m going to get home and get this room finished at all costs. Any cost.
I have to drive ten under the speed limit all the way back to Lockton, and when I get to my driveway, the first thing I notice is that Addison’s not home. My heart pounds. I want to do this and then show her, no fucking delays. At least this way she won’t see me hauling things inside.
I leap out of the car and run around toward the back, tearing at the straps until they’ve all come undone. Get this stuff inside, one more trip into town for the things that are going to tie this together, and then I need to find Addison.
She’s always been the missing piece.
Chapter Forty-Three
Addison
Saturday morning, and I’m killing time at the Dockside with Leah.
Well, not killing time, exactly. Time with my best friend in the entire world isn’t a waste. It’s just that I need to get back to Monday if I’m going to survive, and these long weekend days are eating me alive.
Leah leans across the table and taps her fork on the edge of my plate. “Stop. Thinking. About. Him.”
I sigh. “I can’t.”
“Then. Do. Something. About. It.”
“You have got to stop talking like that.”
“You have got to stop moping around like it’s the end of the world. He lives next door to you, Addi. Just go over and apologize.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Leah cocks her head to the side and narrows her eyes. “Who are you, and what have you done with my non-idiot best friend?”
“I’m not an idiot. I just don’t see any way out of this.”
“You could move.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I have been thinking about it. I thought about it a hell of a lot last night. I thought about packing up some essentials into the back of my car and heading south. It would be warmer, for one, and I wouldn’t have to shovel snow in the winter, for two, and I wouldn’t have to look at Brett’s house every day, averting my eyes whenever I see his car pull into the driveway. I wouldn’t have to feel that rising panic every time I drove home from work, wondering if he’d be home or not. Everything could be different if I moved.
“Well, where would you go?”
“Somewhere warm.”
“You know, everywhere that’s warm has disgusting giant bugs.”
“I could deal with that.”
“You could not deal with that.”
“I could pay someone to deal with it for me.”
Leah rolls her eyes, then takes another leisurely bite of an English muffin. I pick at the scrambled eggs on my plate. I have no idea why I ordered scrambled eggs, and now they’ve gone cold and turned disgusting.
“There’s a simpler solution.”
“What, just go over and apologize?”
“Exactly!”
I shake my head. “Do you really think an apology is going to cut it at this point? There’s nothing I can do to prove…” My train of thought dies inside my head. There’s nothing I can do to prove anything. I don’t even know what I’d be trying to prove. My own regret? How much of a mistake it was to say that to him? Would it even matter?
“I don’t know why you think you’re the one who has to prove anything.”
“Stop.”
“Really.”
“I’m the one who broke up with him.”
“But did you really?” Leah arches an eyebrow. “Were you even…official?”
“We said some things.”
“Some things like what? Did you actually have a discussion about commitment? Did you become a couple?”
I put my elbows on the table and drop my face into my hands. “I guess not.”
“I can’t hear you.”
I lift my face up and scowl at my best friend. “I. Guess. Not.”
“Then doesn’t this seem awfully familiar?”
“To what?”
Leah gives me an incredulous look. “To the end of high school, right before college? When you waited around for him to finally say that he wanted to be with you, and then when he left, you waited around some more, and pined after him, and sulked about the fact that he wasn’t there, and never did anything?”
“I actively broke up with him this time. Or at least the closest you can get.”
“Then actively tell him that you were being a dumbass and that you want to be with him, for real.”
I look at Leah across the table and something shifts in the very core of me, the agonized, aching core that wants more than anything to be in Brett’s arms but can’t take another rejection. Except this time, I was the one doing the rejecting. I was the one trying to protect myself from the phantom hurts of ten years ago, and failing miserably in the process.
“You know what?”
“What?” Leah raises her coffee mug to her lips.
“You’re right.”
She puts the mug down so fast it splashes on the table. “I’m right!” she cheers, drawing looks from the other people in the Dockside. “She says I’m right!”
“Oh, my God,” I say, standing up from the table and putting on my coat.
“Where are you going?”
“Brett’s. Right now.”
Leah beams up at me as I start to rifle through my purse for my wallet so I can pay for the bill. “I’ll get this one. You go get your man.”
Another thought strikes me, colder than
ice, sharper than a knife. “What if he says no?”
Leah reaches up and puts her hand on my arm. “He won’t. Now get the hell out of here.”
I do.
My hands shake on the drive home. I can’t wait to see him. Now that I’ve made up my mind about this, my stomach is in knots. Fifteen minutes and it will be over. I just have to survive these fifteen minutes.
There’s traffic—from where, I have no idea—and so it takes a few extra minutes to get home. I’m jumpy, my nerves tight and on edge, and I grit my teeth, trying not to yell at the old people who take approximately three eternities to turn left at every single side street. It’s not their fault they have no idea they’re getting in the way of what could be a reconciliation for the ages.
Or just the final crashing and burning of a relationship that never really got off the ground.
I shake my head, dismissing the thought, and press down on the gas, the road finally clear in front of me. Not much longer, not much longer…
I pull onto my street and my shoulders relax. The moment is at hand.
Except…
I put my car into park just in front of my garage and look over.
Brett’s car is gone.
He’s not here.
I take a deep breath and let it out.
Well, to the hell with it.
I get out of my car and march across the lawn, then sit down on his porch steps.
I have time to wait.
Chapter Forty-Four
Brett
Two paper bags and one plastic one shift in the backseat on the way back to the house. I hauled in the furniture in record time, peeled away the plastic wrap that they’d wrapped it in at the store, and dragged it into place in the room. I tried three different arrangements before it was exactly how I wanted it.
I checked out the window. No sign of Addison. I want to find her right now and bring her back and show her this room, this room I’ve made for her, but it’s still missing something.
Some things, to be more specific. It’s almost what I have in mind, sans the empty bookshelves.
I lingered in the car for a few minutes in case she showed up, then backed out into the road.
It only took half an hour at the Bookmark to get everything I needed. The redhead working behind the counter’s eyes got huge when I told her what I was doing, and then she went into overdrive, pulling books off the shelves faster than I could read the titles.
“This one,” she said, throwing it onto the pile by the register. “And this one.”
I went into the new book section and picked some of the ones with the most interesting covers while Red laid waste to their used collection. Then I had one more thing to get. The Bookmark has a damn small selection of journals and pens, so that’s what ate up most of the time I spent there.
I settled on one that she’s going to love, and a pen that has good heft to it. You know it’s in your hand when you’re holding it, not like those plastic pieces of shit they sell by the hundred at the grocery store.
“Okay,” I called back to her. “We’re good.”
She put one more stack on the counter and then started to ring everything up at a furious pace, putting most of the books into the two paper bags. I kept the journal and the pen separate, and she whipped out a plastic bag with the store’s logo on it from underneath the counter, placing the notebook and pen in with as much care as you’d give some kind of precious antique.
She handed me the bag, then took a deep breath. “Your total today is going to be—”
“I don’t care about the total,” I said, the tone harsher than I meant. I gave her a half-smile. “Just charge the card.” I dug my credit card out of my pocket and slid it across the counter to her.
The bags were a welcome weight in my arms on the way back out to the car, and I put them in one after the other in the backseat.
On the drive home, I’m lost deep in my head, visualizing where each of those books is going to go, how I’m going to arrange them on the shelves, how it’s all going to come together with the rest of the set-up. I run my mind over every single detail, just like I used to do in the Air Force before I even got into the cockpit. Not one thing was too small to overlook. Then, it was life and death. Now it feels the same way.
I’m thinking so hard about the spines of the books that when I pull into the driveway, I don’t see her. It’s not until I’m out of the car, bags in my arms, that I register the petite form sitting on my porch, shoulders shrugged in her coat, the weak October sun bouncing off her blonde ponytail. The sight of her stops my breath and my movement.
She looks across the space at me, and I look back at her, noticing for the millionth time the way the light reflects in eyes that are a shade of blue I’ve never seen anywhere else—not in the sky, not in the water, not in any of the gunmetal shades of the Air Force. Never before, never again, and now I know it.
Addison shatters the tableau by standing up, carefully, like she doesn’t want to tip forward and fall onto the sidewalk in front of the porch. Her hands are balled up in the sleeves of her jacket. The air has a bite to it that I hadn’t noticed until just now, what with all the intense running around I had been doing from place to place.
“Addi.” The word comes out like a plea and a hot flush of sheer embarrassment crosses my face. No fucking way. This is not how I’m going to approach this moment.
In fact, this moment is going to have to wait because I’ve planned this so carefully, I’ve done all this shit just so that I can show her something real and true, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get to follow through on it.
“Hey, Brett.”
“Listen…” I glance down at the bags in my hands, and I hear her sharp intake of breath. She thinks this is going a different way and I don’t fucking blame her for an instant. “I have to take this stuff inside, just…really quickly.”
“Okay.”
Her shoulders relax a few inches and she takes in a big breath.
It’s fucking cold outside, though, and I can’t have her standing out here while I arrange some books.
“I’m just finishing something up.” Jesus, this sounds fucking lame, but there’s no other way to put it. “You can come in. If you want to.”
She nods, and this time I see a little shiver run down her spine. “Sure. Yeah. I do.”
I turn away from her with a flicker of a smile and reach into my pocket for my keys. It takes about a thousand fucking years to slide the right one into the lock, but finally I push the door open and Addison steps in behind me, gently closing the door.
“Stay right here?”
“Sure.”
Then I hustle down the hall, heart in my throat, to finish what I started.
Chapter Forty-Five
Addison
Brett disappears down the hallway and I watch him go, the bags held lightly in his muscled arms. I want to reach out and run my hands down the lines of his tattoos, but I stay on the welcome mat.
There’s a rustling from the other end of the hall—whatever Brett has in those bags, he’s taking it out now.
I draw in a deep breath of the still, clean air.
Wait—
Brett’s house, when I was here before, smelled like wood shavings and the scent of men working hard. Now I’m getting nothing but fresh paint and a hint of lemon on the shining wood floors. Maybe they’re not real hardwood, but whatever they are, they look amazing. I want to get down and touch them, just to find out, but Brett could come out at any minute.
Everything in the entryway looks flawless, if a little bare of decoration, but Brett has never been much for interior decorating. Renovations, on the other hand…
Mouth slightly open, I step farther into the hall. I’m not going quite to the bedroom Brett is still holed up in, but now I’m dying to see what he’s done to the living room.
The entire thing has been torn out and redone, from the trim to the paint to the floors, all of it brand new installation. Take away his
old couch and this room could be in a magazine as an example of a gorgeous renovation project. Absolutely gorgeous.
“What do you think?” he says from behind me, and my body reacts with a jump.
“Sorry. I noticed that you’d—you’d done some major work, and I got curious.”
The corner of his mouth turns up, a sexy half-smile, and I can’t help smiling back, even though mine is a weak imitation. My heart thuds in my chest so strong and loud. Is it going to just give out on me? If it does, let it not be here, right in front of Brett Miller.
“I get it.”
He puts his hands in his pockets and looks at me, green eyes shining in the afternoon light coming through the windows. They’re such a vivid, wild green that it almost—almost—makes me forget what I came here to do. What I came here to say to him.
“Brett…” I start before I lose my nerve completely. My hands tremble and I clasp them together, trying to get them to stop, and then I let go when I realize it looks like I’ve come to deliver bad news. “About the other day—”
“Wait.” He holds one hand up. “Before you…say anything else, there’s something I want to show you.”
The sigh of relief that escapes my lungs is completely unbidden. “Okay.”
“It’s this way.”
He leads me out of the living room and down the hall to the second bedroom. The door has been closed, and he puts his hand on the knob and pauses, looking over his shoulder at me.
“Should I be nervous?” I can’t stop myself from asking the question.
Brett laughs, and for the first time he sounds like himself. “Have a little faith, Addi.”
Then he opens the door and steps aside so I can go in.
The sound of my own heart takes over everything, filling my ears, and so when I step inside I don’t notice a thing at first except the give of carpet under my shoes. “Shit. Should I have taken off my shoes?”